


Hold Me Fast

by ohmyfae



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Faerie shenanigans, M/M, Mention of human sacrifice, Slight Mention of Blood, somewhat weird faerie sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 17:02:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15756012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: The Prince of the Seelie Court is brought before the daemon king in chains, a tithe to ensure a tentative peace. Trapped in a strange court far from home, Ardyn decides to make a deal.For Ardynoct week day two!





	Hold Me Fast

**Author's Note:**

> (Credit where it's due: r3zuri mentioned the idea of Noct being the daemon king, and I just couldn't get it out of my head!)

The daemon king of Lucis crossed his legs and leaned against his throne, looking out over his court through half-lidded eyes. When he tilted his head, the light of the moon slid along the outline of a pair of branching, silvery antlers, and starlight caught in a web around them, falling like dust in his hair. They were nearly invisible in the dark, but where they passed over the sky, only darkness remained, and the king held his head with the careful air of one bearing a terrible weight. 

It was said that the king had been born on a winter night when a young man fell in the snow at a stone altar, a sacrifice to the gods for mercy from the cold. It was said that his throne was built from that altar, and on nights when snow blanketed the open hall of the Unseelie Court, he could be found stumbling in the dark, a hand clasped to his throat, blood staining his skin.

To Ardyn Izunia, who knelt on the misshapen brick spread out before the throne, the king didn't look like much of a sacrifice. Not when it was Ardyn wrapped in iron, links of it pressing into his fine clothes, eating away at the glamor in his hair and skin. The king simply looked young, and beautiful, and perhaps more than a little bored.

"Oh, hell," he said, and ran a hand through his hair. Stars fell to his shoulders, hissing as they melted into his black cloak. "They've given us another one."

Ardyn bristled. Oh, he'd fought it, certainly. As soon as he tasted the drugs in the drink his brother had given him, he'd dashed the whole cupful into the fire and drawn his sword. He'd fought off most of his brother's guards with a headache banging at his temples and a wall at his back, and even when the first link of chain wrapped around his wrist, he had enough presence of mind to spit one final curse in his brother's level, expressionless face.

"The crown suits you," Ardyn had said, wrenching at a noose of iron hooked around his boot. 

"Yes," his brother had answered. "Yes, it does."

No one from the Seelie Court could have said that Ardyn went meekly through the gates of his brother's hall. If he knelt now, it was because he had no strength to stand. He lowered his brows and scowled at the creature on the throne, who sighed and massaged the back of his neck.

"Maybe I can set you loose," the king said. "Turn you into a... fox. You look kind of like a fox. If you get home without being mauled to death, you can tell your king to stop sending us every person who looks at him wrong."

Ardyn sat back on his heels. This wasn't what he'd expected, to say the least. The tithe to the Unseelie Court, held every ten years at the summer solstice, was a tradition older than the king himself. The rules were clear: The sacrifice went to the king or queen of the Unseelie Court, had their soul stripped from their bones, and the tentative truce between their kingdoms remained. 

"I've never been fond of running, your majesty," he said, and the king rolled his eyes.

"Well, I have too many servants," he said, "and I'm up to my neck in cats."

"Cats?" Ardyn glanced at the milling crowd around them. He'd seen glimpses of the beasts as he came in, coeurls and panthers and small black housecats, but he hadn't given them much thought. "You mean to say..."

The king looked, if anything, mildly uncomfortable. "Well, they couldn't go home."

Ardyn risked a smile. "No, I suppose not." He looked up at the king, at his bright eyes and inky black hair, his shoulders slumped on the throne. "Then I would like to make a wager."

The king shifted. All daemons loved the thrill of a contest, and it seemed the young king was no exception. "Really."

"I go by Ardyn," Ardyn said, and felt the crowd turn dozens of eyes on him, the hall falling into a stunned silence. "But my true name lies in the ledgers of the royal family of the Day Court."

"They sent a prince?" The king leaned forward, his gaze keen, his mouth twisted in an uncertain line. Ardyn feigned a look of noble anguish, which fell a little flat without the aid of glamor to bring a glow to his skin, but he had to make do with the resources at hand.

"True," he said. "And I dearly wish to return to my brother." It wasn't a lie; Lies burned on the tongue when they were spoken, but it wasn't the whole truth, either. By the look of amusement on the king's face, he'd noticed it immediately.

"I'm sure," he said.

"So my wager is this." Ardyn raised his hands, and the chains holding him still clinked on the brick. "If I have discovered _your_ true name by the next solstice, you will let me return whole and unharmed to my dear brother, so that I may repay his kindness with my own."

The king laughed. "My name is buried," he said. "There are no ledgers here. You'll lose, your highness. All you're doing is delaying the inevitable."

"Perhaps," Ardyn said. "Perhaps not."

"Fine." The king rose, and Ardyn grinned, flashing his perfect teeth. "Get those chains off him." He looked Ardyn up and down, lingering on his eyes, his jaw, his open collar. "You have an hour a day," he said. "An hour alone, to ask me what you want. That's fair enough odds for a man like you."

"You honor me, your majesty," Ardyn said, bowing as the chains slithered off his arms and back. The king snorted.

"Right," he said. "That's what I'm doing."

It took Ardyn only a moment in the moonlight to draw up the glamor that kept his clothes pressed and his hair shining. Another moment to step over the cats winding in front of the wooded clearing where the king slept, and a half breath of indecision at the entrance, hands trailing over a web of twisted branches that shielded the king's bed from sight.

"An hour?" he said. The king sat on the edge of his bed, which seemed to have sprouted from a bed of dark sylleblossoms, calmly unbuttoning the front of his shirt. He looked up at Ardyn and smirked, one brow cocked.

"You don't want my name," he said. He kept undoing his buttons, head down, his antlers nothing more than a suggestion of shadow and starlight. "Every now and then I get someone like you. It's easy enough to guess what you really want."

"Oh?" Ardyn passed through the entrance, which closed after him, branches groaning as they filled the gap. "And do you give all of them an hour of your time?"

The king shrugged. His shoulders slipped free of his shirt as he did, his skin smooth and dappled with moonlight. "They're not all princes who get dragged in by the neck," he said, and pulled off his shirt, letting it drop to the bed. "Maybe I have a weakness for tragedies."

"I'd say mine is more of a triumph," Ardyn said. "Somewhere in the second act, of course." 

"Of course," said the king. He fell back on the bed, hooking his fingers in Ardyn's vest. Ardyn collapsed over him, pinning him down, and the king looked up at him with the wide, wild eyes of a deer before the Hunt, teeth bared in a grin. Ardyn held his face in both hands, fingernails brushing his delicate neck, and kissed him, tasting mint on the king's tongue. The king bit down on Ardyn's lower lip, and his hands flew to his vest, fumbling with the buckles. 

"I'll need a name," Ardyn said, as the king ripped at Ardyn's ruffled shirt. "Something to call you by."

"Oh, anything," the king said. His breath was hoarse, his pupils blown. Ardyn lay a hand over his bare chest and felt the rapid-fire beat of his heart. "But some call me Noct."

"Not your true name, though?" 

Noct laughed, and Ardyn kissed him again, chasing the rush that ran through the king like the fear of prey in the sight of a bow. 

When they both lay bare at last, Noct arching beneath Ardyn with his hands raking lines up his broad back, Ardyn reached up to wrap his fingers around the base of one of Noct's antlers, smearing light over its surface. Noct twitched, cock heavy and full between their bodies, and opened his mouth in what could have been a wordless cry of pleasure or exquisite pain. Maybe both. He grabbed at Ardyn's other hand and guided it to the other side, groaning as Ardyn tugged at his half-real crown of bone.

"Like this," Noct said, and Ardyn pushed into him, holding Noct's head fast to the sheets. Noct dug his nails in hard enough to draw blood over Ardyn's shoulders, and Ardyn smiled down at him as he thrust, hard and fast and just on the verge of brutal. 

The king didn't last long. He went pliant when he came, eyelids lowering, lips parted, hands sliding bloody trails down Ardyn's arms. Ardyn slowed, drawing out his own pleasure, and Noct watched him as he fell over the edge at last, burying his teeth in the king's neck.

"Noctis," he hissed, and the king laughed, low and harsh and tinged with a wildness that made the hairs on Ardyn's neck rise. 

"That's only one of my names," Noctis said, and dug his hands in Ardyn's hair, drawing him down for one last kiss. "Come back tomorrow, and I may give you the next."


End file.
